Post-Keynesian Ideas For A Crisis That Conventional Remedies Cannot Resolve

Tag Archives: joan robinson

But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task, if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us, that when the storm is long past, the ocean is flat again.

As you might know, the Indian government cancelled the legal tender nature of majority of bank notes in circulation, earlier this month and asked Indians to deposit them at banks or exchange them for new. The aim according to the government was to curb counterfeiting and what’s called black money here. This is damaging as a large amount of transaction is in bank notes and the implementation has been a failure. People have been standing in queues for the whole day and some even reach banks at 2 am to get a good position in the queue. For many, standing in queues means that the day’s labour is lost. For others, there are delays in wage payments since their employers have problems getting hold of new bank notes. More than 50 people have died. Even 11 bank managers have died due to stress and work overload.

Despite this we keep hearing from the government and the ruling political party’s defenders that the benefits will be long term.

The previous Indian Prime Minister (who was the nation’s leader during mid 2004-mid 2014), Manmohan Singh gave a scathing speech in the Indian Parliament yesterday in which he quotes Keynes on the long run. Manmohan Singh was a student at Cambridge and his heroes are Nicholas Kaldor and Joan Robinson and presumably John Maynard Keynes as well. In this era where politicians are promoting neoliberal ideas, it’s good to see the master being quoted in a Parliament.

The seven-minute video is linked below.

click the picture to see the video on YouTube.

This question about the long-term reminds me of super-hysteresis which was referred by Marc Lavoie recently in an article for INET. It’s closely related to the Kaldor-Verdoorn law in which demand affects supply. The damage done to the demand side because of slowdown in production caused by the Indian government’s poor implementation of its decision to replace majority of bank notes by value affects the supply side as well. Almost nobody who talks about the long-term benefits talks about this issue.

Wikileaks has released “The Podesta Emails” which show Hillary Rodham Clinton’s political positions best explained by an NYT article:

[Clinton] embraced unfettered international trade and praised a budget-balancing plan that would have required cuts to Social Security, according to documents posted online Friday by WikiLeaks.

The tone and language of the excerpts clash with the fiery liberal approach she used later in her bitter primary battle with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and could have undermined her candidacy had it become public.

Neoliberalism, the “New Consensus” and pre-Keynesian economics stand exactly for this idea: free trade and balanced-budgets. John Maynard Keynes’ true followers starting with Joan Robinson stood exactly in dissent against the idea of free trade and balanced budgets. Keynes himself understood the trouble with free trade, as can be seen by reading his chapter on Mercantilism in the General Theory, but didn’t emphasize it enough. Unlike what others see, Joan Robinson stood for her opposition to free trade more than anything else.

According to the New Consensus of economics, fiscal policy is impotent and hence budget should be balanced. Free trade will lead to convergence of fortunes of nations according to this view. Instead what we see is polarization. In my previous post, I quoted a top advisor who conceded how economists had been wrong about fiscal policy. But the damage seems to have done. Progressive and Keynesian ideas have a long battle ahead.

Needless to say Donald Trump is not the alternative. So there’s a lot of fight ahead for economists in years ahead to overthrow the new consensus. Macroeconomics makes a difference in people’s life, and it’s a battle worth fighting.

There’s a paper by Jason Furman who is the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers which concedes how wrong economists were on fiscal policy. The link is a file hosted at the White House’s website! The paper starts off with a remarkable admission on fiscal policy (h/t and words borrowed from Jo Michell)

A decade ago, the prevalent view about fiscal policy among academic economists could be summarized in four admittedly stylized principles:

Discretionary fiscal policy is dominated by monetary policy as a stabilization tool because of lags in the application, impact, and removal of discretionary fiscal stimulus.

Even if policymakers get the timing right, discretionary fiscal stimulus would be somewhere between completely ineffective (the Ricardian view) or somewhat ineffective with bad side effects (higher interest rates and crowding-out of private investment).

Moreover, fiscal stabilization needs to be undertaken with trepidation, if at all, because the biggest fiscal policy priority should be the long-run fiscal balance.

Policymakers foolish enough to ignore (1) through (3) should at least make sure that any fiscal stimulus is very short-run, including pulling demand forward, to support the economy before monetary policy stimulus fully kicks in while minimizing harmful side effects and long-run fiscal harm.

Today, the tide of expert opinion is shifting the other way from this “Old View,” to almost the opposite view on all four points. This shift is partly the result of the prolonged aftermath of the global financial crisis and the increased realization that equilibrium interest rates have been declining for decades. It is also partly due to a better understanding of economic policy from the experience of the last eight years, including new empirical research on the impact of fiscal policy as well as observations of the reaction of sovereign debt markets to the large increases in debt as a share of GDP in the wake of the global financial crisis. In the first part of my remarks, I will discuss the theory and evidence underlying this “New View” of fiscal policy (with, admittedly, the core of this theory being an “Old Old View” that dates back to John Maynard Keynes and the liquidity trap).

Compare that to the Post-Keynesian view, which according to Wynne Godley and Marc Lavoie in their book Monetary Economics written before the crisis (from chapter 1, Introduction):

The alternative paradigm, which has come to be called ‘post-Keynesian’ or ‘structuralist’, derives originally from those economists who were more or less closely associated personally with Keynes such as Joan Robinson, Richard Kahn, Nicholas Kaldor, and James Meade, as well as Michal Kalecki who derived most of his ideas independently.

… According to post-Keynesian ideas, there is no natural tendency for economies to generate full employment, and for this and other reasons growth and stability require the active participation of governments in the form of fiscal, monetary and incomes policy.

… There is also the problem of the relative levels of different types of earned income. Here we have the famous marginal productivity theory. In perfect competition an employer is supposed to take on such a number of men that the money value of the marginal product to him, taking account of the price of his output and the cost of his plant, is equal to the money wage he has to pay. Then the real wage of each type of labor is believed to measure its marginal product to society. The salary of a professor of economics measures his contribution to society and the wage of a garbage collector measures his contribution. Of course, this is a very comforting doctrine for professors of economics, but I fear that once more the argument is circular. There is not any measure of marginal products except the wages themselves. In short, we have not got a theory of distribution.

We have nothing to say on the subject which above all others occupies the minds of the people whom economics is supposed to enlighten.

There’s an article at Evonomics by Joseph Stiglitz, which is an excerpt from a chapter from a book. Stiglitz has denounced the marginal productivity theory. He says:

The trickle-down notion— along with its theoretical justification, marginal productivity theory— needs urgent rethinking. That theory attempts both to explain inequality— why it occurs— and to justify it— why it would be beneficial for the economy as a whole. This essay looks critically at both claims. It argues in favour of alternative explanations of inequality, with particular reference to the theory of rent-seeking and to the influence of institutional and political factors, which have shaped labour markets and patterns of remuneration. And it shows that, far from being either necessary or good for economic growth, excessive inequality tends to lead to weaker economic performance. In light of this, it argues for a range of policies that would increase both equity and economic well-being.

… Neoclassical economists developed the marginal productivity theory, which argued that compensation more broadly reflected different individuals’ contributions to society.

It reminds me of the debate between Paul Krugman and Thomas Palley some time ago. Paul Krugman completely denied all this. In his blog post at his blog for The New York Times, Krugman said in April 2014:

But doesn’t that show that conventional economics is indeed capable of accommodating big concerns about inequality? You fairly often find heterodox economists insisting that to accept the idea that capital and labor are paid their marginal products, even as a working hypothesis to be modified when you address things like executive pay, is to accept that high inequality is morally justified. But that’s obviously not the case: there are plenty of economists who are willing to use marginal-product models (as gadgets, not as fundamental truth) who don’t at all accept the sanctity of the market distribution of income.

So you have two mainstream economists: Paul Krugman defending orthodoxy and Joseph Stiglitz denouncing the marginal productivity theory.

There is no branch of economics in which there is a wider gap between orthodox doctrine and actual problems than in the theory of international trade.

– Joan Robinson, The Need For A Reconsideration Of The Theory Of International Trade, 1973

Orthodox trade theory tells us that the “market mechanism” should work to resolve imbalances in the current account of balance of international payments. Although, the economics profession has conceded that Keynesianism is correct, it is still far from thinking clearly about international trade.

So it is a bit surprising that The Economist would say something unorthodox about this. In a recent article it complains about Germany:

This is the Post-Keynesian idea that surplus economies put a burden on deficit economies.

A fiscal expansion by the German government has the effect of raising domestic demand and imports and reducing the German current account balance of payments. This allows the rest of the world to grow both because of German imports and also because they are less “balance-of-payments constraint”.

Second, Brad Setser has a blog post on the current account surplus of the Republic of Korea (South Korea).

It’s impressive to see Setser get the causality right:

Fiscal policy alone doesn’t determine the current account (even if tends to be the biggest factor in the IMF’s own model). A boom in domestic demand, for example, would improve the fiscal balance and lower the current account surplus, just as a fall in private demand improves the current account balance while raising the fiscal deficit.

The current account balance, government’s budget balance and the private sector financial balance are related by an identity and sum to zero. But the identity itself shouldn’t be confused with causation.

The correct causation between the balances is between domestic demand and output at home versus abroad. This causality has been highlighted by Wynne Godley in the past. See more on this blog post by me here.

Dani Rodrik has a new article, The Abdication Of The Left written for Project Syndicate. He says:

The good news is that the intellectual vacuum on the left is being filled, and there is no longer any reason to believe in the tyranny of “no alternatives.” Politicians on the left have less and less reason not to draw on “respectable” academic firepower in economics.

Consider just a few examples: Anat Admati and Simon Johnson have advocated radical banking reforms; Thomas Piketty and Tony Atkinson have proposed a rich menu of policies to deal with inequality at the national level; Mariana Mazzucato and Ha-Joon Chang have written insightfully on how to deploy the public sector to foster inclusive innovation; Joseph Stiglitz and José Antonio Ocampo have proposed global reforms; Brad DeLong, Jeffrey Sachs, and Lawrence Summers (the very same!) have argued for long-term public investment in infrastructure and the green economy. There are enough elements here for building a programmatic economic response from the left.

This is fine, but it wouldn’t be enough to solve the world’s problems because the world as a whole is balance-of-payments constrained as most individual nations are. What is needed is a coordinated response at the international level – a concerted action.

In his 1984 book Causes Of Growth And Stagnation In The World Economy, Nicholas Kaldor wrote:

I should like to end this series of lectures by suggesting the outline of a world-wide agreement on the necessary policies for recovery. The programme could be summed up under four main heads:

The first is coordinated fiscal action including a set of consistent balance of payments targets and “full employment” budgets.1 If this does not prove to be politically feasible, it is inevitable that the growth of unemployment will sooner or later force governments to take measures that would make it necessary for them to expand demand without being frustrated by the inevitable balance of payments consequence of expanding their economies relative to their trading partners. This means that there needs to be some form of restriction that would limit the increase in “competitive” imports to some target ratio in relation to exports. Trade liberalisation, which played such an important part in the rapid economic progress during the years of expansion, becomes a serious obstacle to economic recovery in the case of prolonged stagnation due to the inability of countries to achieve a coordinated set of policies. But, given a proper recognition of the problem, that under conditions of unrestricted free trade the actual volume of production and trade may in fact be considerably less than under some system of regulated trade – a system which relates the volume of imports in manufactures from a particular group of countries, such as the members of the EEC, to some mutually agreed ratio to the exports of individual members to the rest of the group – there is no reason why full employment should not be restored through policies of expansion, preferably directed by the expansion of State investment. This coordinated action by all countries, instead of isolated actions by each country, is the first and most important requirement of recovery.

1 At present all countries have fairly large deficits in the general government budget, but these are largely the consequence of the low level of activity. On a “full employment” basis they would show a highly restrictive picture – they would show surpluses and not deficits. Contrary to appearances, the requirement of stability is for expansionary budgets with lower taxes and higher expenditure, and not further fiscal restriction (as is advocated, for example, by M. de Larosiere of the International Monetary Fund).

Before the crisis, the economics profession believed in two orthodoxies:

crude version of Monetarism, which treats the stock of money as exogenous and also claims that fiscal policy is impotent.

free trade.

While policy response following the 2008 crisis have made economists realize that the first orthodoxy is wrong, they are yet to realize the orthodoxy of the second. As Joan Robinson said in her 1973 article, The Need For A Reconsideration Of The Theory Of International Trade, “there is no branch of economics in which there is a wider gap between orthodox doctrine and actual problems than in the theory of international trade”. The recent consensus of the economics profession on the debate about the UK EU referendum highlights it. Instead of the invisible hand, we need a visible hand, i.e., a coordination at the international level. The leftist response as highlighted by Dani Rodrik are welcome but still leave the problem open. So one needs both this and a world-wide fiscal expansion with balance-of-payments targets.

The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was published in January, 1936.

Meanwhile, … , Michal Kalecki had found the same solution.

His book, Essays in the Theory of Business Cycles, published in Polish in 1933, clearly states the principle of effective demand in mathematical form. At the same time he was already exploring the implications of the analysis for the problem of a country’s balance of trade, along the same lines that I followed in drawing riders from the General Theory in essays published in 1937.

The version of his theory set out in prose (published in ‘Polska Gospodarcza’ No. 43, X, 1935) could very well be used today as an introduction to the theory of employment.

He opens by attacking the orthodox theory at the most vital point – the view that unemployment could be reduced by cutting money wage rates. And he shows (a point that Keynesians came to much later, and under his influence) that , of monopolistic influences prevent prices from falling when wage costs are lowered, the situation is still worse, because reduced purchasing power causes a fall in sales on consumption goods …

Michal Kalecki swam into my ken just after the publication of the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, in 1936. The small group who had been working with Maynard Keynes during the gestation of the book understood what it was about, but amongst the public as a whole it was still a mystery. Kalecki, however, knew it all. He had taken a year’s leave from the institute where he was working in Warsaw to write the theory of employment but Keynes’ book came out, and got all the glory. Michal never made any claim for himself and I made it my business to blow his trumpet for him, but most of the profession (including Keynes) just thought that I was being kind to a lame duck. Only since the publication of his essays written in Polish from 1933 to 1935 has it been generally recognized that he had already worked out all the essentials of what became known as Keynes’ theory (Selected Essays on the Dynamics of the Capitalist Economy, Cambridge University Press, 1971). He showed that it is investment, not private saving, that brings about capital accumulation; that a government deficit, in a slump, will increase employment; that cutting wages only makes the slump worse; that the rate of interest depends upon supply and demand of the stock of money, not on the flow of saving, and that it is the forward-looking expectation of profits that induces firms to accumulate.

The question of glory did not seem to me to be important. As Michal was the first to admit, his ideas would have taken a long time to establish while with Keynes they burst upon the world as a revolution. But I was deeply impressed by the fact that two thinkers of such different background and habits of thought could arrive at the same diagnosis of the economic situation. Logic is the same for everybody; the same logical structure, if it is not fudged, can support quite different ideologies, but for most social scientists ideology leaks into the logic and corrupts it.

In the natural sciences, it is common enough for the same discovery to come almost simultaneously from two independent sources. The general development of a subject throws up a new problem and two equally original minds find the same answer, which turns out to be validated by further work. In the history of economic thought, the case of the discovery of the theory of employment by Keynes and Kalecki is unique.

Before I begin, Brian Romanchuk has written a reply to my previous post. Highly likely you have seen it, but if you haven’t check it out. I will reply soon but for now I want to tackle neoclassicals economists’ dubious claims.

The background for readers not having seen recent debates is that Paul Krugman has launched a vicious attack claiming that it is not possible for the U.S. economy to grow at 5.3%. His analysis is just some random averaging of numbers more than anything else. In my argument, it doesn’t matter if it is Bernie Sanders or someone. The question is just about possibilities. The question is: is 5.3% possible in the next four US presidential years?

First, 5.3% over four years is about 23%.

The United States doesn’t have full employment. A lot of people are working part time and many others are discouraged from work. So cannot the U.S. government boost domestic demand and raise real GDP by 23% in four years?

Of course, it can do it.

But the debate has been hijacked by debating purely about productivity. Here’s Noah Smith for example:

So neoclassical economists are making it look as if it is only a matter of rise in productivity.

Why does productivity matter? If there is full employment and no additions to the labour force, production can only rise if productivity rise. This is purely a matter of definitions and not a causal statement. In fact, the causality is from production to productivity and not the other way round. But if there isn’t full employment, production can rise even if there is no rise in productivity. It’s just about more people who were not employed before, producing more stuff. In addition a lot are also joining the labour force for the first time. So production can rise without productivity rising.

Now with high unemployment and people working part time and people discouraged from looking for work, it is entirely possible that almost the whole of 23% is purely attributed to this.

Think Okun’s Law.

So productivity rises is really a sideshow here. But it’s good if it rises. But it’s sad that the debate is centred around productivity rises.

In summary 23% can be reached by

Rise in production attributable to no rise in productivity

Rise in productivity. (Caused by the rise in production itself).

The debate is centred around the point 2. This is not surprising. Neoclassical models are built assuming full employment, so an economist is simply trained to think of point 2 and not think about point 1 at all. As Joan Robinson would say:

Before ever he [a student] does ask, he has become a professor, and so sloppy habits of thought are handed on from one generation to the next.